2/20/09

It appears as though John is just as excited about Roku-Hyaku as I am. He’s promising to do a metric butt-load of body work on the thing and make it pretty. He’s also browbeaten me into going ahead and buying a set of Sumitomo 175/50-13 tires. Ms. Clio might get repossessed, but we’ll have tires on Roku-Hyaku. He’s really cracking the whip on this project. He has assigned me the task of finding the engine and differential for it. Now, this is going to sound like me being a bitchy little girl but, he's the one with the contacts in those areas. I'm just saying. I think I'm going to go shopping on e-Bay for a Honda CR-V differential right quick. Hang on. As usual, a waste of time. Ok, so John and I were discussing the sequential shift pattern the other night. I asked his opinion on, “pull back to upshift” versus “push forward to upshift.” He’s of the opinion that we need to pull back so as to not “fight the ‘G’ force.” I counter that argument with, “But you’ll be lifting off the throttle when making the shift and therefore won’t be experiencing any ‘G’ force so a forward bump to upshift works too.” Of course he’ll counter with, “Your face will experience ‘G’ force!” No, he’ll counter with, “That argument goes out the window on downshifts because you will be fighting the negative ‘G’ force of braking while trying to pull back to downshift.” That is when I would counter with, “Your mom has negative ‘G’ force!” I guess we’ll pull back to upshift, unless of course the mechanism just won’t configure that way. I don’t see how it could possibly not work, but I don’t want to paint myself into a corner. Yeah, like I've ever worried about plans changing from day to day. Anyhoo, I just got a call from the Tire Rack making sure I really want 175/50-13 tires because they don’t have a Honda N600 in their database. I assured them that we took measurements and that really is the size I want. I wish now I'd done what John suggested and put 2007 Cadillac Escalade as the car for which these tires are being bought! “You know,” they’d say, “those tires won’t fit that car, right?” I'd then say, “Yeah they will. We’re wrapping them around the brake rotors.” Oh well, what are you going to do? I've been called away twice now and my train of thought is totally derailed. I think I'll go play solitaire for a while and come back later. Well, it is now 1500 h and I have nothing new to add. Yeah, I guess I'm just going to have to call it a rant. I'm sure I'll have a big report Monday, probably spilling over into Tuesday. We’ll see. Have a day.